Flirting in the Desert
by generalsleepy
Summary: Troy and Dietrich are captured together. Troy is looking for a way to pass the time. You can read it as Troy/Dietrich, but you don't have to.


Night in the desert was bitterly cold. Troy had never fully grasped just how a place could swing from scorching to freezing in the space of hours. Moffitt could explain it: sand reflecting sunlight, thermal energy - when you started him on something like that he went for the full professor act. Tully was the only one who kept listening after that.

He guessed being shut up in a cellar didn't help. He sat huddled in a corner with arms crossed, one knee to his chest. His other leg was outstretched, his swollen, bleeding ankle propped up on a scrap of wood. He didn't know whether it was broken or just sprained, but it sure as hell hurt. He would have welcomed one of Moffitt's lectures now. Really, just about any distraction.

Instead, he was stuck with a silent German for company.

Dietrich sat in the opposite corner, staring down at his boots. The two of them happened to make eye contact. Dietrich cleared his throat. "How is your leg?" he asked, voice and expression studiously neutral.

"I'll pull through." Troy moved around and tried to hide a wince. His ribs ached. He might have had one of those broken for him too when the Jeep overturned. Troy, in the back, had taken the brunt of the damage. Dietrich walked away with a nasty bump on the head and probably a concussion, though he refused to let on anything, even as he wavered drunkenly on his feet.

Troy supposed he had to thank the bandits who had hit them with a grenade then stripped anything of value from the Jeep, before tying them up and dumping them in his hole underneath a ruin. He'd been guarding their rear, Moffitt, Hitch, and Tully scoped out the area. Dietrich, who they already knew had been separated from his unit had gotten the drop on him. Troy had been tied up in the back of his own Jeep, still grinding his teeth over Dietrich's smug smile, when they were ambushed.

He guessed that the theives had left them behind so that they could come back later, once they had taken the Jeep back to their hideout and completely pulled it apart for scrap. (He hated to think about Tully's genius handiwork being mishandled by a bunch of scroungers). Maybe they would kill one of them and sell the other to the opposing army for ransom. Or something else; neither of them could understand what the men were saying. He realized he sometimes took it for granted having a walking polyglot dictionary at his elbow.

Dietrich sighed, hugging his legs to his chest. "If the temperature drops much more we'll need to conserve bodyheat if we're to keep moving tomorrow. Sitting back to back is the most effective method."

Troy gave a crooked grin. "Are you flirting with me, Captain?"

Dietrich looked over his shoulder at him, frowning slightly. It took a moment for Troy to notice the hint of confusion in his eyes. Troy's smile grew. "Flirting? Heard of it?"

He turned away in a huff. "I'm certain it's something unrelated to the issue at hand.".

"Well, looks like you might not be as good at English as you're always bragging about. Falling down on that, what does Moffitt call it, idiomatic speech."

"That would be slang, not idiom."

Dietrich's annoyance was something better to focus on than the cold digging it's way under his skin, so Troy kept needling. "Not that slangy. I'd think it would have come up somewhere along the line."

Dietrich shuffled around to face Troy again. "Quite rich coming from you, the American who never bothered to learn another language."

"I'm working on it." Moffitt had been teaching him some basic German phrases and vocabulary, focusing on those most useful for their situation.

"Oh?"

"Wir haben ein verwundet Mann. Wir brauchen ein Arzt."

Dietrich smirked. "Your accent is awful."

"So, back to flirting."

"All right, what does it mean?" Dietrich rested his against the wall and shut his eyes. "We've nothing else to do. Might as well have a lesson."

"Okay." Troy had to pause for a shiver that crept up his spine. He shoved his hands under his armpits, trying to find some more warmth. "What do you call it in Germany when a man sees a girl he wants to take out, so he tells her she looks nice, buys her lunch, helps her put on her coat? Then she bats her eyelashes, tells him she can stay out a little while longer?"

"Two people indicating to each other they want to be intimate, but refusing to actually say it clearly." Troy nodded. "Flirten. Flirting. I should have figured that one out." His forehead creased. "No. I was not 'flirting' with you, Sergeant. I was merely suggesting that we may want to avoid suffering the early stages of hypothermia before we're rescued. "

"Only one of us is going to be rescued," Troy reminded him. He couldn't hide the next bout of shudders. His ankle was throbbing, the cold only aggravating the pain.

"There's nothing we can do to change that here and now." Dietrich got to his knees and shuffled over to Troy, ankles bound with wrists behind his back. Troy begrudgingly moved away from the corner, so that when he sat down they were back-to-back. He had to admit, it was more comfortable than the cold stone.

His exhausted body took the slight uptick in comfort as an excuse to start sliding into sleep. Bad idea. As much as he and Dietrich could play friends - as much as Troy could get a kick out of the way the German pouted when his smug was pierced, as much as they could work together, as much as Troy knew there were times when Dietrich was a better man than he - at the end of the day, they were still enemies. If they left this dungeon together, it would with one of them as a prisoner

And if he didn't want that to be him, Troy couldn't allow himself to let down his guard for a moment.

"You better buy me a malt first if you're going to start getting fresh," he mumbled. Bothering Dietrich was a good way to keep himself focused.

Dietrich sighed, his shoulders pushing back against Troy's. Both of them had closed their hands, to keep their hands from being pressed together, though the position of their arms made it uncomfortable. "I'm not in the mood for more slang, Sergeant."

"This how all your dates started? 'It's getting cold, here, take my coat'?"

"Hören sie bitte auf zu sprechen, Unteroffizier, um Gottes Willen." He was obviously trying to sound irritated, but something in his voice told Troy that Dietrich was as engaged in the childish back and forth as he was.

"And they call French the language of love..." The pain had travelled up his leg. Everything below his knee felt like it had been worked over with a hammer. He tried to adjust it slightly and let out a sharp hiss. His fingers instinctively curled around Dietrich's.

It wasn't until the sting of pain had faded that he realized exactly what he was doing. He quickly let go. He could have sworn, though that, for a second, he'd felt the pressure of Dietrich's hand holding just as tight as his.

He didn't want to talk about flirting anymore. And he didn't want to think much about why that was. "You were behind the wheel of that Jeep for about, what, ten minutes, before you swerved and crashed? I think we do better with your half-tracks when we get a hold of them."

"Well, perhaps that reflects the engineering skills of our respective armies." There was an odd, tight tone to Dietrich's voice that Troy could identify with.

"We haven't found it that hard..." He lost track of that sentence. He felt Dietrich shiver and then sag slightly against him. He could sense that Dietrich was as tired, and refusing to acknowledge it, as he was. He was acutely aware of their knuckles brushing together. A part of him, a very stupid, exhausted part, just wanted to grab the German's hand and relax into that little bit of warmth.

He was thinking about teenagers brushing shoulders and making doe eyes and wishing he could hold Hauptmann Dietrich's hand. He needed the remaining Jeep to get there now. The desert was getting to him.


End file.
